On The South Side, Soul Food Has To Knock Your Shoes Off

June 12, 1987|By Jay Pridmore.

Elyria Magraff and her husband, Edward, opened Hel-Lee`s Restaurant at 407 E. 69th St. about seven years ago, but only now does she feel that the place is getting established. If that sounds to North Side restaurant owners like a long time to wait for fame and fortune, so be it. The South Side has different rules when it comes to restaurants.

Great soul food restaurants on the South Side--and there are not many of them--have long pedigrees. Gladys` Luncheonette, 4527 S. Indiana Ave., is one of the most famous. Army and Lou`s, 422 E. 75th St., is another. These places have been around for decades and are known even to people who have never been there.

So what makes Magraff think she now deserves that kind of recognition?

``Well, we finally have a biscuit that I`m happy with,`` she says. It is a buttermilk biscuit, served with breakfast and often for large groups, and it took a while to perfect. Biscuits, she says, are one thing that made Gladys` a sort of mecca.

Obviously, it takes more than biscuits to gain the adulation of the South Side. But the keystones of success for this type of restaurant are pretty basic. (Trendy soul food is an oxymoron if there ever was one.) Soul food, sometimes called country cooking, is comfortable food. ``We like to have a Southern atmosphere,`` Magraff says. ``That is one of hospitality and friendliness.`` Things like this are not created by designers.

The cuisine at these restaurants is a little hard to define. In the strict sense, soul food, says Helen Anglin, who owns the Soul Queen, 9031 S. Stony Island Ave., uses things such as chitlins, fat back and other parts of the animal that might otherwise be discarded. Scrambled eggs and brains is another dish that is sometimes mentioned.

Country cooking, on the other hand, has a broader definition; it includes roasts, stuffing, short ribs, catfish, ham hocks and different ``smothered``

dishes (simmered in onions, celery and other things). All this is served with greens (such as collards), ``sweets`` (candied yams) and a

variety of other vegetables.

You won`t get many imported ingredients or fancy herbs with country cooking. ``Most everything we use is the kind of thing that could be grown in the back yard,`` says Magraff, though city life has her spending much time in grocery stores.

Magraff laughs when she says she went into the restaurant business only under protest. But her husband, Edward, prevailed. He is a 35-year veteran of the railroads, and has been a chef and waiter on dining cars, first for Burlington and now for Amtrak. While he still spends time away on

transcontinental runs, he comes back and does much of the cooking. His specialties include short ribs braised in vegetables, catfish cooked in a batter with a bit of cayenne pepper, and a brisket seasoned with garlic and oregano.

``Consistency is the main thing in the restaurant business,`` Edward Magraff says. And one of the problems in running a homestyle restaurant like this one is keeping kitchen people long enough to keep the food consistent.

``Everyone cooks things a little differently,`` Elyria Magraff says. New cooks have their own ways of cooking black-eyed peas--she prefers to let them cook until they make their own gravy. Some people make peach cobbler a little thicker than hers. And she finds that some of her more discerning customers test the kitchen by ordering liver, because cooking a piece of liver rare takes experience.

Good full-service restaurants are not common in these parts--the South Side is peppered with fast food outlets but underserved with places where cooking is done to order. That puts a place such as Hel-Lee`s, on a small commercial strip off the beaten track, under scrutiny. It means you have people who come with regularity, sometimes twice a day. And you even get the attention of prominent citizens such as Mayor Harold Washington, who likes the short ribs and the peach cobbler, says Elyria Magraff. But the scrutiny also makes customers turn away when the quality changes for even a short time.

Elyria Magraff says that she treats her job much as she did when she was a schoolteacher. ``We hire a lot of young people here,`` she says. ``In that sense, I`m still teaching.`` The objective is to create a family atmosphere.

``With Greek restaurants and Italian restaurants, you often have a family working already. Here, you have to create a family, and employees who don`t fit in don`t last very long.``

According to many black restaurant people, it`s harder to build a restaurant in these communities than it once was. Twenty years ago, many South Siders felt uncomfortable in downtown restaurants; so places such as Gladys`